A question about what states were most-frequently represented on the HN homepage had me do some quick querying via Hacker News's Algolia search ... which is NOT limited to the front page. Those results were ... surprising (Maine and Iowa outstrip the more probable results of California and, say, New York). Results are further confounded by other factors.
HN provides an interface to historical front-page stories (https://news.ycombinator.com/front), and that can be crawled by providing a list of corresponding date specifications, e.g.:
So I'm crawling that and compiling a local archive. Rate-limiting and other factors mean that's only about halfway complete, and a full pull will take another day or so.
But I'll be able to look at story titles, sites, submitters, time-based patterns (day of week, day of month, month of year, yearly variations), and other patterns. There's also looking at mean points and comments by various dimensions.
Among surprises are that as of January 2015, among the highest consistently-voted sites is The Guardian. I'd thought HN leaned consistently less liberal.
The full archive will probably be < 1 GB (raw HTML), currently 123 MB on disk.
Contents are the 30 top-voted stories for each day since 20 February 2007.
If anyone has suggestions for other questions to ask of this, fire away.
NY is highly overrepresented (NY Times, NY Post, NY City), likewise Washington (Post, Times, DC). Adding in "Silicon Valley" and a few other toponyms boosts California's score markedly. I've also got some city-based analytics.
Well... opened my Substack stats and got very confused.
Turns out one of my old essays got posted on Hacker News? Substack is saying a lot of the traffic was "direct" but this is a lot more than I'd usually get when I hadn't actually posted about the newsletter or published anything new.
not anymore, my friends from #hackernews , not anymore . @midzer built thumbnails and WEBP-support for #flohmarkt today. and i helped him integrate it. it's amazing to see how fast stuff is loading now :)
in backend news, we made the communication with SMTP-servers more resilient, so your outbound mails just take a beer from the fridge and chill if your mailserver isn't available for a few moments.
52% of Serious Vulnerabilities We Find are Related to Windows 10
"The high average numbers of 'Critical' and 'High' findings are largely influenced by assets running Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Windows Server operating systems."
Does this mean we should upgrade all our Windows 10 laptops to Windows 11?
(Learned it from a #HackerNews#YCombinator screenshot, which further cements my desire to not read that fucking cesspool of a news website. it's basically a couple of the worst subreddits smooshed together, with none of the upside…)
It’s interesting that #hackernews seems to have done some sort of moderation action to my piece to lower its ranking. It was top of the site and then suddenly disappeared from the first page.
I navigated through Hacker News today, just to see the layoffs from Bandcamp, StackOverflow and Linkedin via different articles, then I swore nicely and closed the damn tab.
Three years ago on this day, I published my first Mac app, HacKit. It’s a Hacker News reader and the name is a portmanteau of Hacker News and AppKit. It’s a pure Cocoa app written in Swift with no SwiftUI integration.
Periodically an #Emacs post makes it to the front page of #HackerNews. Usually it's the same tired set of opinions and misunderstandings—both in the post and the comments.
But every now and again there's a post like this one today, that steps outside the box to show why Emacs is still delightful and still relevant. Thanks, @bbatsov!
ok, since I am still waiting for my Usenet account (via solene), my first attempt at gnus-ing my emacs is via nnhackernews.
Since hackernews is already threaded, it works charmingly well.
Dickmao made a twitter backend for nus, so perhaps I will be able to find an activitypub one? One thing I don't like about Mastodon is the general idea - a flow of posts, all with hidden hierarchy. Having this in a threaded UI would make it a million times better. Maybe one day :)
I've always wanted an RSS feed of only the interesting stories, blog posts, and longreads that make it to the Hacker News front page. Thus, I am happy to announce that I've just made and released one: https://feedle.world/hacker-news
I'm working on a #programming project (#opensource) and I want to make a post about it on #HackerNews.
It is functional and works quite well for having started work on it recently. Should I just make the post on HN?